Watercolor Painting for Dummies (4 page)
Read Watercolor Painting for Dummies Online
Authors: Colette Pitcher
Tags: #Art, #Techniques, #Watercolor Painting, #General
Some art basics help get the party started. These basics are called the
elements of design.
You use these pieces to design your paintings. This section is like Art 101 — you can use the information here for all types of art in any medium.
I tell you what to do with these elements of design in Chapter 6, which presents the
principles of design
— the verbs you use to act on the elements of design, which are the nouns of painting.
The basic elements of design that I explore in the following sections and throughout this book are
Shape:
A circle, square, or triangle, for example, or any other organic form (blobs and other curvilinear shapes)
Line:
A continuous path between two points
Size:
The quality of being large or small or somewhere in between
Direction:
The overall physical arrangement of the objects within a painting — either vertical, horizontal, or diagonal
Texture:
The real or implied tactile quality
One more element of design is color, which is so much fun that I use all of Chapter 5 to talk about it.
You were taught to recognize geometric shapes as a child, so you have a head start on working with this element of design. But I have a few tricks up my sleeve that you can use:
See everyday objects as simplified shapes.
Developing this vision lets you draw more quickly and accurately. (Chapter 8 helps with your drawing skills.)
For example, a house is a cube with a pyramid on top with a cylinder for a chimney. And even though a rose looks really complicated, you can simplify it into a circle or oval first. A complex garden may begin by breaking down the shapes into many ovals first.
Make shapes more interesting by varying their sides and edges.
Squares, triangles, and circles are equal-sided shapes and are less interesting in a painting than unequal-sided shapes (see Figure 1-2). Try to create shapes that are more intriguing to look at by varying the sides and edges of the shapes.
You’ve heard that variety is the spice of life. In art, variety is the essence of interesting design. Chapter 6 covers this concept in more detail.
Group elements in your painting to create a shape.
Some shapes are implied. Take a look at the tree on the right in Figure 1-2. It forms an overall triangle. This tree is more interesting to the viewer because the triangle isn’t equilateral — the three legs are different lengths.
Figure 1-2:
Even versus uneven-sided shapes.
Size is just what you expect: big versus little. And yes, in art, size matters. Objects using the elements of line and shape can be different sizes, as can areas of texture.
You can direct the viewer to see what you think is most important by making it larger or
dominant.
(More discussion on dominance in Chapter 6.) One flower bigger than all the others captures the viewer’s attention and creates more interest in your painting than having all the flowers equal in size. An example is Figure 1-3. The big flower is the star of the show, and the other flowers are the supporting cast.
Figure 1-3:
The bigger flower gives the viewer a focal point by using variety in size.
You can influence the viewer with size. For example, Georgia O’Keefe forced viewers to really look at a flower by taking what is normally small and making it huge. Her paintings have a grand impact because of their large scale. Con- versely, small paintings can bring your viewer in and create an intimate relationship.
Variety of size is nice. After all, if all the flowers in a painting were the same size, you’d have wallpaper. A nice design for wallpaper, sure, but probably not an exciting painting. (Chapter 7 talks about composition and making more creative painting designs.)
You can also make something small the attention grabber. Check out Figure 1-4 — a Western painting featuring a lone cowboy on a horse in the rain. Everything is dismal gray to make you feel the weather and the cold the cowboy is experiencing. But he’s wearing a bright yellow slicker that immediately grabs the viewer’s attention, not because the rainwear is so big in the painting, but because it’s a small change of color in a big area that is all the same.
Figure 1-4:
A small size can take up a lot of space in a viewer’s eye.
Size is also important to establish
aerial
perspective.
Bigger objects appear to be closer, and smaller objects seem to recede into space. (I discuss perspective in Chapter 8.)
